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Nonprofit Chat with Doug Brown
The Interview Transcript
Hugh: Greetings. Russell Dennis and Hugh Ballou are back. As normal, we are interviewing someone that has really good content. Tonight, our guest is Doug Brown. Doug is an expert in a number of areas. I have known him for a few years. Every time that I have a conversation with him, I learn a lot of stuff. I want you to take notes. There will be some infographics and other things you will be able to take advantage of. Go to nonprofitchat.org if you want to see the notes and the transcript. Doug Brown, welcome to the Tuesday nonprofit chat.
Doug: Thanks, Hugh and Russell. It is a pleasure to be here tonight.
Hugh: Tell us a little bit about you. You run Newswire, and you have this really secret power with LinkedIn. Give us a sense of who you are and what your skills are.
Doug: Well, I have been in Internet marketing since there has been Internet. Our first project was in 1995, and that is about the start of Internet marketing. I have been around the Internet and trying to figure out how to capitalize on the resources there for a long time. I hate to date myself, but I wasn’t really young when I started doing that either.
At any rate, in 2003, we started a company—I was involved when it started—of Newswire Network. Newswire is a press release distribution program. It goes to Google News. It syndicates press releases on behalf of other people across the web and in the real world also. Newswire has been a fairly successful company. It has been around for a long time. We experienced some meatier growth in the last few years, and almost all of that is attributable to what we did in LinkedIn. You and I have been talking about that a little bit, and I appreciate the chance to share what we have learned about LinkedIn and connecting and social marketing. I think all those things are applicable to anyone who is trying to form relationships and trying to monetize their relationships, whether it’s in a for-profit setting, a nonprofit setting, or just about anywhere else. That is my background. I have been in journalism and Newswire almost exclusively for the last 13 years. But like I say, part of running any business is finding people to pay you to use your service. We figured something out about LinkedIn that may not be totally unique. I am sure other people have figured out similar ways to utilize the platform, but maybe what is unique is I am willing to sit here and talk about it.
Hugh: That’s awesome. I see a lot of people on all social media, and LinkedIn is no exception. It is social. Social means relationship. I get tired of people hammering me with stuff. The expertise that you bring to clients is how to build relationships and how to build your sphere of influence because in charities, we want to have donors, we want to have board members, we want to have volunteers, we want to have stakeholders who are participating. That ain’t going to happen if we haven’t built a relationship and understand what their passion is. Russell has spoken about that in previous sessions, about how do we connect with a passion of the people who really could serve us well. We are going to talk primarily about LinkedIn tonight…
Doug: Let me just pick up on that and emphasize that that is exactly true. When we started seeing some growth in our business is when we decided we are going to start forming relationships with people rather than just trying to present them with *audio issue* And that is what social networking and specifically LinkedIn is great for. We talk about some of the differences between LinkedIn and other social networks. It really is social first, and you have to remember that.
Hugh: It is. There are so many people who don’t understan